DeLaWho? DeLaWhat? DeLaWhere?

I have not posted at all over the past five or so days because I have been listening in amazement to the new Roots album, "The Tipping Point" which came out this past Tuesday. A lot of hip-hop heads say that
hip-hop is in a bad state because of the explosion of the art form into pop/mainstream culture. While much of the pop rap that is released is admittedly shallow and repetitive, you cannot say that hip-hop is struggling when you have artists such as The Roots, Talib Kweli, Common, Kanye West, Little Brother, The Beastie Boys, and many others releasing innovative, creative, and ingenious albums. Earlier this year Kanye West's "The College Dropout" snuck up on me because I was expecting amazing production and so-so lyrical content. However, I expected brilliance from the Roots....and they delivered by surpassing my sky high expectations. The album is just raw...the beats, the rhymes, and the life (paraphasing Tribe Called Quest) all of it come together to produce an energizing and mind blowing album. Black Thought comes with lines like:

• Touching on the state of the rap game...."Black Thought he rock
  it sharp so the speakers will bleed/I run a triathlon you wouldn't see
  the fatigue/I'm a star am maybe y'all should cop something to read/Or
  trade some of ya'll equipment for something you need/Cause it's a lot
  of bullshit flooding the scene/Where everybody's a star and hot shit is
  few and far between/You lose a grip on what garbage mean/Shorties wanna
  be themselves I know it's hard to be/Don't wanna do the Ruben Studdard
  and come off less threatening/Keeping it real will kill you if you end
  up letting it"


• On the state of the world..."Yeah it would be cool it could be
  too/Stop running round in circles off of what we fuel/Living a lie
  eventually believing it's true/A lot of people here for us one could be
  you/It's outrageous and they just ain't nothing/But save us an ocean of
  brown fists in various flavors/A flavor for a favor man, this is the
  majors/Tell me what you would do with no phones or pagers/No Kinko's no
  Fed Ex and no ATM's/What you gone do when the police state begin/Well
  it already began but I guess it depends on what's really going on
  what's happening/Huh/ Military target practicing/They finna write
  another Patriot Act again/The days is short the night is long/The fight
  goes on."


• State of Black Culture..."And some might say that it's a waste of
  time/Cause ain't no amount of dancing finna break the bondage/We go to
  war and transcend space and time/When every record ain't a record just
  to shake behinds....Believe it's on as long as we can still speak
  freely/Pages of my life make it hard to read me."


• some quick one-liners...




• "I got the soul of a young Sam Cook/When I spit I make you wanna make a new dance up"


• "And I'm calm, calculated, and perfectly aligned/The way I'm operating, what is it?/Surgery in rhyme."


• "I play em out like a game of Monopoly/Let it speed around the board like a astro/And send to jail for tryna pass go"

I could go on and maybe I will....but now is not the time. The next installment of my makeshift review will touch on the music behind Black Thought. Meanwhile checkout these reviews of the album:

• Rolling Stone
  (I don't completely agree)...PS. Rolling Stone is the same brilliant
  magazine that gave Outkast's Speakerboxxx/The Love Below a 3 of 5 star
  review....seems as though many critics and millions people disagree.
  
  


• Response to Rolling Stone


• TTP Reviewed on NPR


• RapReviews.com

other hip-hop news: Rapper Jadakiss Blames Bush for Sept. 11